Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

‘What is going on, Dr Hauser?’ Rud asked in a voice that was breaking with a dawning sense of dread. The technician had realised all too late that they were to be purged along with the lab.

‘I’m sorry, gentlemen. I can’t allow either of you to fall into enemy hands. However, I want to thank you for your diligence over the past few months,’ Hauser said with an ill-placed smile. He nodded at Bosch.

The Feldwebel unshouldered his machine gun and, without a moment’s delay, fired the entire clip at both men.

Hauser’s face flickered with excitement at the sight of the two technicians as they collapsed to the ground; one of them drummed his feet noisily against the base of the corrugated metal door in a post-mortem spasm.

‘Give me your gun,’ he said. Bosch passed Hauser his weapon.

‘And now, about your family, Joseph,’ said Hauser, walking menacingly towards Schenkelmann, pointing the gun at him.

‘You wanted to be with them again, didn’t you?’ He placed a hand on Schenkelmann’s shoulder, squeezing it, caressing it.

‘You’ve been a good little Jew, your work has been excellent, and I’m very pleased with you. Now, I made you a promise, didn’t I, Joseph? What was it now? I’ve forgotten,’ he said, with an empty smile.

Schenkelmann nodded and smiled awkwardly back. ‘Yes, we agreed.. didn’t we, my family and I — ’

‘Oh yes… so we did. I’m sorry.’

Hauser shook his head with feigned sadness, pouting his bottom lip with cruel mock-sympathy. ‘I’m sorry, they’re dead, Joseph. I’m sure you’ll understand that we didn’t have time to mess around dragging them over here with us. It would’ve been a nuisance. They died this morning — what?’ He turned to the SS men in the truck. ‘Half an hour ago?’

Schenkelmann started hyperventilating and slumped to his knees. There he began to cry, his voice a weak, warbling high-pitched moan.

Hauser’s face curled in disgust at the broken man. He raised the gun and pointed it at his head. ‘Oh dear. Well, goodbye, you pathetic Je-’

A loud clatter of gunfire shattered the tableau and a stunned Hauser dropped the weapon as a fleck of stone stung his cheek.

A dozen or more US soldiers had emerged from an archway further down the back street. The American men had instinctively dropped to the ground and leaped for the cover of the doorways opposite them and now lay down a furious volley of gunfire up the street.

Two of Bosch’s men dropped, one of them dead instantly. Another four were wounded. One of them lay on the cobbles and shook uncontrollably as blood and air bubbled from a rip in his neck.

Hauser scrambled away from Schenkelmann, on all fours, back towards the truck as a storm of bullets zipped down the street at head height. He felt a bullet whistle past his ear with a low hum, and the rattle of a dozen more as they hit the cobbles on the ground around him.

The remaining men of the Wehrmacht platoon scrambled for cover on either side of the vehicle and began to return fire, while the SS men in the truck unslung their weapons and let off a volley from within.

A single bullet thudded into Schenkelmann’s back and pushed him over on to his face, where he curled into a foetal position as the gunfight progressed, bullets whizzing in both directions, inches above him.

Hauser managed to make his way back to the truck and opened the cabin door. He waited for a second’s lull to shriek an order to Bosch and his men. ‘You must hold this position at all costs, the truck must get away!’ Hauser’s thin, reedy voice reached Bosch, who reissued the order in a much louder parade-ground voice.

Hauser turned to the driver and screamed as he climbed in. ‘Drive, for God’s sake!’

Bosch heard the truck’s engine stutter to life and it immediately lurched forward as the tyres spun on the cobbles. From his precarious position behind a small sapling he watched the truck rumble down the street and turn a corner before calling out to his men.

‘Right, fuck that idiot’s order. We’ll hold for another minute, no more.’

His voice attracted a burst of gunfire and splinters of wood exploded from the sapling’s trunk. He cursed Hauser for dropping the gun he had handed him in the street like a startled old woman. The gunfire died off for a moment. He could hear one of the Americans shouting orders to his men. Bosch had enough street-fighting experience to know that they were trying for a flanking position. The American officer was sending some of his men into the furniture warehouse to find a way up to the windows that overlooked him and his men.

That’s what he’d do if the situation were reversed.

‘Shit,’ he muttered. He looked around and saw two of his men looking to him for instructions. Silently Bosch pointed at a window overlooking them and held up a fist, which he pulled down in a short tugging action and drew a finger across his mouth.

Grenades — through that window — on my command.

Both men nodded and each pulled out a stick grenade, they unscrewed the caps and made ready to tug on the fuse string. The gunfire had stopped. The Americans down the street were waiting for their colleagues to get into position before pressing home the attack.

Bosch studied the windows intently and soon caught a glimpse of the top of a helmet bobbing inside the building. They were making their way along the first floor to the window that looked down on to his position behind the splintered tree trunk. He nodded to his men and both threw their grenades up. One dropped through the window effortlessly whilst the other clattered uselessly against the window frame and dropped back down onto the stones below. He counted to seven before the first grenade went off inside the warehouse, producing a shower of dust from out of the windows and knocking a frame down on to the street. The other grenade exploded on the cobbles, shattering the few windows left intact on the ground floor of the furniture warehouse.

Bosch waited for the cloud of dust to clear. The grenades seemed to have done the trick, it looked like they had stunned, wounded or killed the men up there. Otherwise he’d have expected a retaliatory volley raining down on them by now.

He looked for the Jewish scientist; he was lying in the road, but still moving. A pool of blood had grown around his torso and a small river trickled across the street, meandering through the cracks between the stones.

He’s lost too much blood to survive the wound.

If he’d had his gun on him he could have made sure of that with a shot or two to the head. Bosch knew enough that the Americans couldn’t be allowed to capture the Jew alive. Hauser had made that quite clear.

Smoke was coming up from the lab below and billowing out through the arched door, thicker than it had been a minute ago, the fire must have caught and already be spreading.

He looked up the street.

The truck must be far enough away by now.

He nodded, assuring himself that they had done enough.

He signalled to his two men across the street that the fight was over, that they should put down their guns. He looked around for the others. It was time to get a quick tally on what had happened to his twelve men. Now that the truck, and the hard cover it afforded them, was gone, they had hastily spread out, seeking safe positions along the street. There were three sheltering in one of the warehouse’s doorways further back and another two taking turns to fire short bursts from an archway closer to the Americans. He saw the bodies of five of his men lying in the cobbled street, those that had been caught off guard by the opening exchange. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly. His men instinctively turned towards him.

‘That’s it, weapons down,’ he bellowed.